Mother Courage

Barbara Sukowa plays chain-smoking philosopher Hannah Arendt.

The director of a movie about contentious Jewish writer-philosopher Hannah Arendt talks to Peter Calder.

German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt is most widely known as the author of a five-part article in the New Yorker, for which she had covered the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi officer who was one of the major day-to-day organisers of the Holocaust.

Her pieces, later published in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem, came to contentious conclusions.

She accused Jewish leaders of abetting the slaughter and, most controversially, coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to advance her principal idea: ordinary people, even nobodies, can commit evil acts if they simply renounce the duty to think.

The film Hannah Arendt, with Barbara Sukowa as the intense, chain-smoking title character, is a testament to a woman of fearless intellectual honesty and conviction, and it does not shy away from her problematic passion for the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party. Veteran German director Margarethe von Trotta has long regarded Arendt as a hero. But finding backing for a film about her was a struggle.

One can perhaps understand misgivings about a project that is really a film about ideas. The action is people talking about how one should perceive Adolf Eichmann?

Yes. That was my misgiving too, in the beginning. How can you do a film about a philosopher? But when an idea is put in your mind, it starts to grow. The main problem was to find out what story we wanted to tell. To do Hannah's whole life would have been very complicated, because her life was so full of events; she always said it was like the Niagara Falls. But in going to the trial of Eichmann and writing the story, I was convinced that I had a person I could look at. She is the observer of him but we are her counterpart, in a way, observing her and we have the chance to wrestle with the same problems.

The idea of challenging orthodoxy makes the story very applicable to our time, to any time.

She was always very open to new ideas, new thoughts. So she was not classical: even though she derived from Plato and Kant and Heidegger, she never created a system or a school. She regarded philosophy and politics as equally important. There is a very famous interview she did in the 60s in which she said that after 1933 when she fled to France [where she was briefly interned by the Vichy regime before getting a visa for the US] that she didn't want anything more to do with philosophy because so many colleagues had found something in Nazism that pleased them.

From your perspective, did Hannah ever shake off the taint of her association with Martin Heidegger?

I think she loved him until the end. That's another story that interests me because I like contradictions in people. She was very young when she met him and he was a brilliant philosopher who had mainly Jewish students. She was very disappointed and horrified that he became a member of the party but nevertheless one part of her emotions was still there for him. When she went back to Germany in the 1950s she wrote to a friend vowing that she would never see him again because he's a murderer and a criminal and some days later she want to Freiburg and met him.

Does the script use a lot of Arendt's words or is the dialogue an invention?

Both. We read almost everything she wrote and met many people who knew her, who gave us a lot of information and told us what to read of her letters. She wrote about 2500 letters to so many people that we could base our knowledge of her on. I don't know what we will do in future when there are no letters. You need that flesh to build up the character.

The film blends re-enactment with archive footage very cleverly but you decided not to cast anyone as Eichmann, relying just on the trial footage. Why?

From the beginning I knew I had to use the real Eichmann. If you had an actor, all you would see is his brilliance as an actor. You would not see his mediocrity, which was the essence of what Hannah is telling us.

Who: Margarethe von Trotte, director
What: Hannah Arendt
When: Opens in cinemas Thursday

- TimeOut